Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
Are the only professions in which you can be so wring and still hold onto your job. Case in point.
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The cover pays tribute to the one and only Mariano Rivera, profiled by Tom Verducci. (Of course, there may be more than one “Mariano Rivera,” but you know what I mean.) Joe Posnanski contributed this piece on Mark Reynolds, the Diamondbacks’ strikeout artists — and I don’t mean the good kind. There’s this little item […]
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Lee Jenkins pays homage to Detroit, the backbone of the country, and the Tigers, with a photo of Comerica Park on the cover. Other baseball items of note: Joe Sheehan on the upcoming free agents: Buyer beware. Phil Taylor on Brad Lidge
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A few germane baseball items over the week that I overlooked: In today’s edition, John Klima, author of the recently relased Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend (Wiley), published this item on how the Yankees blew their chance to sign Willie […]
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To break the ice at parties, some hosts might engage their guests in some questions, such as “Which character, real or fictional, would you enjoy having a dinner conversation with?” For many baseball fans, it might be Bill James, as Joe Posnanski, late of the Kansas City Star and new to SI.com, does in this […]
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Former NY Times baseball writer Murray Chass takes on the subject of anonymous sources in his most recent column. This issue came up in baseball books a few times this year, most notably Serena Roberts’ biography on Alex Rodriguez. Critics took her to task for using A.S. and dubious testimonials about the ballplayer’s use of […]
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Alan Gratz’s Brooklyn Nine, the story of a young Jewish boy’s love for baseball in the early 20th century, is featured on the cover of the September issue of Booklist, the publication of the American Library Association. The issue highlights a sports theme and includes a number “top 10” choices in several categories, such as […]
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Author Daniel Ford previews his as-yet-unfiehsed baseball novel on his epnonymous blog, Baseball Sunday with Daniel Ford. So, some of the ballparks are going the healthy route and selling fresh fruit? What are they, my mother? A review of a book about old baseball by a young fan (Major League Baseball Players of 1916, published […]
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Hey, I missed one. So sue me. Just wanted to highlight this article by Luke winn about “The Last Iconic Baseball Card.” Care to guess who it is before you read the piece? A Hint: it cae out 20 years ago. In a similarly belated development, MLB picked Topps as its “official” card of choice. […]
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Only one feature in the issue (NFL Preview) and it concentrates on the Texas Rangers’ pitching staff. Hearing some disturbing things lately about this publication. From Thewrap.com: The numbers are hard to fathom. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, a staggering 75 percent of consumer magazines saw their single-copy sales decline between June and […]
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The cover story is Insane Bolt and his record-breaking performances. As far as baseball goes: MLB Poll: Who’s the biggest Chatty Kathy on the field? With the final month of the season about to begin, Tom Verducci looks at those players that might make the difference between the post-season and the off-season for some teams, […]
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The weekly pub previews why the Bombers should succeed in the post-season in its Aug. 31 issue.
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Player poll: Which opposing hitter do you fear most with the game on the line? Joe Sheehan on the Red Sox (“They’re not dead, they’re just restin’“)
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The Sporting News (cover date July 6) has a nice piece on ballparks, picking three reasos for loving the top 5 fields (Fenway, PNC, Wrigley, Camden, and AT&T), plus one for the rest of them, ranked in order. Bad news for the Mets, whose costly domicile ranks # 18 our of 30. The other top […]
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Just ask Lenny Dykstra, according to this article from Folio, an industry publication. Many of Dykstra’s financial woes stem from the failed launch of the Player’s Club, a monthly magazine for professional athletes he published in partnership with Doubledown Media—a publisher of magazines aimed at the Wall Street elite—which went out of business earlier this […]
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I no longer subscribe to the print version of SI, but I do pick up the occasional copy (which is kind of silly since the cost of four or five newsstand editions is roughly equivalent to a deep-discount subscription). The annual “Where Are They Now” is one of them. The editors usually do a good […]
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Joe Mauer on the June 29 cover of SI? He was batting .407 when the story was published, which according to Baseball-Reference.com, must have been June 21. Since then? Five hits in 25 at bats, dropping his average 21 points to .386. Zack Greinke had a similar drop off shortly after he appeared. I wonder […]
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Uh-oh, Joe. Minnesota catcher Mauer is the cover story. You know what that means. Just ask Zack Gerinke, who appeared on the May 5 issue. Prior to the stiry, he was 6-0 with a 0.40 ERA. For four games, beginning with his May 31 start, he gave up 15 earned runs in 26 innings and […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In a former life, I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted an award-winning bog about Jews and Sports.
I did a profile piece on the legendary cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was very generous in immortalizing me in this caricature.
My article on Sandy Koufax in the 1965 World Series appears in
My article on the later biographies of Babe Ruth appears in
My article on the Mets’ 1969 postseason appears in
Profiles of several Jewish baseball figures appear in
* Weathermen and sports prognosticators
September 11, 2009
These are the only professions where you can be wrong a good portion of the time and still keep your job. Phil Taylor writes about this phenomenon in the Sept. 7 issue of Sports Illustrated. Even though he’s writing about football, it’s still germane. How many baseball genius picked the Mets to at least get […]
Tagged as: baseball writres, disabled list, predictions, sportswriter
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